Automate downloading files from SFTP

psftp your a true treasure

I’ve been struggling lately to find online the right script to help get started with a task I needed to deliver: download a file from a SFTP server in a timely manner (using Windows Task Scheduler). All my searches led me either to FTP download automation scripts (not what I was looking for) or deployments that seemed at that point far to complex.

So… psftp was the chosen tool.

Instructions:

1. Look for psftp.exe in puttygen’s website.
2. Once downloaded, copy the file to:

C:\Windows\System32

3. In your working directory, say C:\DownloadFTPFiles, create a commands.txt file.

This file will contain the browsing command to the relevent directory inside the FTP server using basic DOS commands, i.e. cd folder1 to browse to folder1 and a get command to download the relevant files to your working directory (-r = recursively):

cd folder1
get -r c:\DownloadFTPFiles\FromFTP

4. The syntax is quite simple including the SFTP server, username, password and the path to the commands.txt file.

psftp 123.123.123.123 -l user1 -pw MyPassword123! -b "C:\DownloadFTPFiles\commands.txt"

5. Give it a try, once confirmed the files downloaded successfully you can embed the syntax above in a batch or PowerShell file and add it to a Scheduled Task.